In the lead up to my one-year wedding anniversary (um, where did the time go?), I’d love to share with you some meaningful wedding moments that my husband Evan and I created to celebrate the joining of our blended family.

When my partner Evan and I started planning our wedding, we hit the ground running because I had already been immersed in weddings.  As a wedding stationery designer, I had already begun dreaming up colour palettes and beautiful styling, and Evan was totally on-board with going through the process with me.  But we had something even more important to consider at every step of the process – how did we want to celebrate the joining of our two families, in the most meaningful way?  Between us, Evan and I have five children, and this event was a ceremony to mark the formal coming together of all seven of us.

We were intentional about our day.  We didn’t want to include something if it didn’t feel right for us, and we didn’t run with the latest trends.  But we did want it to feel deeply meaningful, and so we still chose to include moments and ritual that felt special to us and our children.

Meaningful Stationery

I really thought carefully about the wedding invitations.  The sky is the limit when a stationery designer creates her own invitations, and so this actually made the process more difficult!  Evan and I wanted a way to symbolically include all seven of us, and because I love painted stationery, I decided to create a painted design with seven elements.  When our baby was born, Evan created a little family of seven bears on his 3D-printer, all enveloping each other, to represent the seven of us.  I used this idea and painted seven semi-circles laid together, sitting pride of place at the top of the invitation.  When I put it together with a beautiful font, a petal-shaped card, a couple’s monogram, and a unique cutout on the back for the RSVP, it really felt exactly like us.

While I absolutely love paper and the special experience it brings when your guests receive the invitation in the mail, we chose online RSVPs, bringing together physical and digital processes.  It makes for a smooth process for guests, and is easy to collate when you’re just weeks out from the wedding!

Hot tip for engaged couples: Have you seen the free tool Joy? We used it for our online RSVPs – it’s amazing! (And not even a sponsored or affiliate link, it’s just a great tool.)

Unique Ceremony Moments

We spoke to our celebrant Michelle Kiernan about how to celebrate and include all the children in the ceremony.  With an age range of 11 months to 19 years, this was no easy feat!  We came up with two rituals that we wanted do alongside the more traditional parts of reading vows and exchanging rings.  The first was a ring-warming ceremony, but instead of the guests warming the ring, we gave the ring box to each of our children, and they were invited to make a silent wish for our family.  All the children felt really included here (although baby Ruby just sucked on the box for a bit!) This part really felt like we created a meaningful wedding ceremony.

We then included an activity where we all put our fingerprint on an image to create a family tree.  After Evan and I signed our certificate, the seven of us put our fingerprints around a tree, and we now have it framed up in our house to commemorate the day. 

No Wedding Cake

Don’t get me wrong – Evan and I love cake, and we even ordered wedding cake samples and had the whole family try them out (we don’t regret that!)  But after some consideration, we decided that we just didn’t need to incorporate this as part of our wedding.  We already had a beautiful three-course meal served during the reception at Balgownie Estate Yarra Valley, and so instead of having a wedding cake as well, we decided to have a gelati cart from Vanilla and Co after the ceremony.  It was a really warm day, and this was the perfect addition to the pre-dinner drinks and canapes time.  We had so many other beautiful moments throughout the day, we felt like we just didn’t need the cake-cutting as well.

Balancing Meaningful Wedding Moments and Tradition

For us, it was important to do our wedding our way.  But it didn’t mean ditching every tradition, it meant curating a series of meaningful moments to create an event that celebrated and honoured the coming together of our two families.  We even decided to take all the kids on our honeymoon to Fiji – the last big family holiday where all seven of us would be there.  And now we can look back on this time and know that we really did have the celebration of our dreams in front of all of our family and friends.

Images of stationery by A Tactile Perception; images on the day by Allie Claire Creative.

This post was originally published on Polkadot Wedding here.